After a minute of fruitless effort he gave up the attempt on the door and moved about the little building, seeking other avenues of escape.  The only window was a narrow affair, high up at the back, hung on hinges and fastened with a hook and staple.  He climbed up on the fish nets and empty boxes, got the window open, and thrust his head and one shoulder through the opening.  That, however, was as far as he could go.  A dwarf might have squeezed through that window, but not an ex-varsity athlete like Russell Brooks or a husky longshoreman like “John Brown.”  It was at the back, facing the mouth of the creek and the sea, and afforded a beautiful marine view, but that was all.  He dropped back on the fish nets and audibly expressed his opinion of the lock and the man who had bought it.

Then he tried the door again, again gave it up, and sat down on the fish nets to think.  Thinking was unsatisfactory and provoking.  He gave that up, also, and, seeing a knothole in one of the boards in the landward side of his jail, knelt and applied his eye to the aperture.  His only hope of freedom, apparently, lay in the arrival home of the lightkeeper.  If Seth had arrived he could shout through that knothole and possibly be heard.

The knothole, however, commanded a view, not of the lighthouse buildings, but of the cove and the bungalow.  The bungalow!  Ruth Graham!  Suddenly, and with a shock, flashed to his mind the thought that his imprisonment, if at all prolonged, was likely to be, not a joke, but the most serious catastrophe of his life.

For Ruth Graham was going to leave the bungalow and Eastboro that very day.  He had begged to see her once more, and this day was his last chance.  He had written her, pleading to see her and receive his answer.  If he did not see her, if Seth did not return before long and he remained where he was, a prisoner and invisible, the last chance was gone.  Ruth would believe he had repented of his declaration as embodied in the fateful note, and had fled from her.  She had intimated that he was a coward in not seeing his fiancee and telling her the truth.  She did not like his writing that other girl and running away.  Now she would believe the cowardice was inherent, because he had written her, also—­and had run away.  Horrible!

Through the knothole he sent a yell for rescue.  Another and another.  They were unheard—­at least, no one emerged from the bungalow.  He sprang to his feet and made another circle of the interior of the boathouse.  Then he sank down upon the heap of nets and again tried to think.  He must get out.  He must—­somehow!

The morning sunshine streamed through the little window and fell directly upon the pile of newspapers he had brought from the kitchen and thrown on the floor.  His glance chanced to rest for an instant upon the topmost paper of the pile.  It was a New York journal which devotes two of its inside pages to happenings in society.  When he threw it down it had unfolded so that one of these pages lay uppermost.  Absently, scarcely realizing that he was doing so, the substitute assistant read as follows: